Benchmarking Java and.NET by

With the advent of.NET there are now two major enterprise development environments, J2EE and.NET. Both use an intermediate language/virtual machine paradigm, which provides many capabilities and features that previous development environments did not. In deciding which platform to develop on there are many differences between the two that need to be taken into consideration, but one of the most important ones is speed. Which compiler/runtime environment will run my program faster? How much faster? Measuring the speed of a system can be rather difficult, mainly because it begs the question "speed of what? " Do you want to know how many integer multiplications the machine can do in a second? How long memory accesses take? How much method overhead there is? How fast array operations are performed? Ultimately, the question the developer wants answered is, "how fast will MY program run? " which is a combination of all these factors. My objective however is not to determine the relative performance for a specific type of application, but rather the performance characteristics of the two environments i